The Influence of Class Habitus on Consumer Behaviour - Essay Example

The Influence Habitus on Consumer Behaviour: An Application of Bourdieu’s Theory of Distinction By of Professor Name of University Name of Department Date of Submission Introduction Consumer behaviour is influenced partly by the individual consumer’s habitus. An individual’s habitus is defined as “a structured and structuring structure,”1 from which taste, values, lifestyle, and practice emerge. The person’s habitus enables the fulfilment of specific consumer roles and prevents the acceptance and performance of other roles. Furthermore, the supply of capital that a person holds influences consumer behaviour. Capital, in its different varieties—economic, educational, social—intermingles with the consumer’s habitus to form ‘dispositions’ in relation to consumer settings. Consumers who do not have economic capital are not likely to become ‘choosers’ in relation to consumer settings; their choice will depend on what they can pay for.2 Capital, similar to habitus, results in particular values and behaviour and has a tendency to prevent others in specific situations. Bourdieu argues that class position is not rooted loosely in the ownership or non-ownership of means of production (e.g. capital, labour) just like in Marxist materialistic explanations of class.3 He uses the ideas of Weber, which enables him to classify various classes and class segments in a hierarchical scheme instead of viewing class as two classes opposed to each other, even though he keeps the idea of class struggle.4 Bourdieu views class as shaped by the ownership of varying sums of different types of capital. Nevertheless, Bourdieu, contrary to Marx, who simply took into consideration economic capital, expands the notion of capital to other social domains, which he claims are themselves social outcomes which are mingled and which can be utilised to generate more capital.5 Of such, symbolic capital and cultural capital are the most important for this paper. This essay gives a detailed example of how class habitus shapes consumer behaviour, particularly food preferences and consumption patterns, using Bourdieu’s theory of distinction and other theories of social class. Influence of Class Habitus on Food Preferences and Consumption Patterns If Bourdieu identifies an obvious relationship between class and consumer behaviour, he also views his theory as different from an income model. Although he recognises that a great deal of consumer behaviour is related to income levels, Bourdieu argues that this connection is arbitrated by the nature of habitus. He says that “income tends to be credited with a causal efficacy which it in fact only exerts in association with the habitus it has produced”.6 The superiority of habitus over mere amount of cash in influencing consumer behaviour “is clearly seen when the same income is associated with very different patterns of consumption.”7 In other words, it can be observed: … whenever a change in social position puts the habitus into new conditions, so that its specific efficacy can be isolated, it is taste—the taste of necessity or the taste of luxury—and not high or low income which commands the practices objectively adjusted to these resources.8 As a detailed example of how class habitus shapes consumer behaviour, a number of current empirical studies have reported that class is still a strong determinant of consumer behaviour in relation to food. In fact, Bourdieu gives an explanation of how class habitus shapes consumers’ food preferences or eating practices. Primarily, he realises that a plain interpretation of the statistical measurement of the consumption of various foods gives analysts the opportunity to: See a simple effect of income in the fact that, as one rises in the social hierarchy, the proportion of income spent on food diminishes, or that, within the food budget, the proportion spent on heavy, fattening foods, which are also cheap… declines.9 Nevertheless, as Bourdieu further explains, this crude interpretation cannot explain differences in consumption practices and preferences between social classes who have the same incomes but display quite distinct food preferences and eating behaviour.10 Yet, the actual norm determining such distinctions in food preferences is the disagreement between the “tastes of luxury (or freedom) and the tastes of necessity”.11 Preferences are determined by the material circumstances of existence. The tastes of necessity stem from the need to produce labour capacity at a minimum cost thus the inclination towards heavy, highly satiating foods among the members of the working class. Bourdieu then studies spending patterns on what he refers to as ‘three styles of distinction’ wherein the core conflict between the tastes of necessity and the tastes of luxury is shown through patterns of consumption differently by different class segments within the major class.12 In relation to buying food, for instance, Bourdieu identifies apparent distinctions between professionals and teachers on the one hand and commercial and industrial workers on the other in how they show their preferences in their buying behaviour. These distinctions show how these class segments differentiate themselves from the tastes of necessity which distinguishes the preferences of the members of the working class.13 This allows Bourdieu to create a diagram of food space and to forecast the types of preferences different segments will have, depending on the specific groupings of economic and cultural capital. Class segments lower in cultural capital and high in economic capital have a tendency to choose comparatively high quantities of salty, fatty, strong, rich food, whilst class segments lower in economic capital and high in cultural capital chose outlandish, organic, health foods.14 On the contrary, the preference of class segment low in economic and cultural capital is nourishing, boiled, fatty, salty, and affordable foods.15 The preference for specific foods is strongly connected to the lifestyles of a specific habitus because it is connected to a specific separation of domestic economy and domestic labour. A preference for intricate casserole foods, which require substantial amount of time and effort, is associated with a long-standing notion of a woman’s role.16 The most observable ‘taste’ within the perspective of manifested inequality is the factual patterns of dietary consumption. For instance, there are extensive statistic epidemiological findings to prove that well-off people in Western countries are likely to have premium nutrition, whilst people of lower socioeconomic class prefer energy-filled foods that are lacking in nutrients.17 Calnan and Cant (1990), employing Bourdieu’s ideas, demonstrated that the habitus of food preferences was a fundamental aspect of these continuous differences, in a research that hypothesised that middle-class women place emphasis on disciplined eating and ‘balanced diet’, whilst women of the working class place emphasis on the necessity of a meal being heavy and satiating though not really nutritious.18 As such, a widely supposed individually ‘preferred’ aspect that influences food consumption is indeed structurally constructed.19 The interaction of economic, cultural, social, and physical capital is significantly shown in the case of childhood obesity. Among children of the lower class the risk of obesity is assisted by circumstances that generate a habitus of poor eating, poor exercise, in places teeming with fast food restaurants and inadequately furnished recreational and health-focused services, and insufficient dissemination of information about nutrition.20 These children of the working class are therefore highly vulnerable to obesity in adulthood and who will thus be vulnerable to cancer and diabetes. Hence the working-class habitus will over the succeeding decades generate a cyclical phenomenon of growing illness in childhood, progressing into later life, and create the first generation in the contemporary period to perish before their parents of avoidable illnesses brought about by social inequalities.21 Class-driven food consumption practices serve to create specific kinds of bodies. These ‘distinctions’ have significant health outcomes related to the creation of specific body types. Health and bodies are perpetuated and disseminated after the systems of inequality—physical, cultural, and economic.22 Bourdieu was concerned as well with how behaviour towards the body influenced food preferences. He explains that: Tastes in food also depend on the idea each class has of the body and of the effects of food on the body, that is, on its strength, health and beauty; and on the categories it uses to evaluate these effects, some of which may be important for one class and ignored by another, and which the different classes may rank in very different ways.23 Bourdieu finds out in his research that individuals in clerical and professional jobs were more prone to believe that “the French eat too much”24 whereas industrial labourers and farm labourers were less tolerant or accommodating of the new cultural standard of control. People of low socioeconomic classes were less interested than the other classes in the necessity to sustain a slim body.25 Alternative Theories However, Bourdieu’s theory of distinction is challenged by the post-Fordist school, which argues that as the period of mass consumption declines habitus or lifestyles become increasingly varied. This argument, inspired by concepts of culture and reflexive sociology, states that customary class-based consumer behaviour should be vanishing as individuals no longer want to be identified with a class in the traditional way.26 In what several scholars call post-traditional period, it is claimed that the significance of reflexive self-identity and lifestyles become more and more central to the detriment of more established social practices.27 Slater sums up this kind of distinction in the following way: Lifestyle is different from the traditional status orders it replaces and from modern structural divisions (such as class, gender and ethnicity) in at least two crucial respects. Firstly, lifestyle tends to indicate a purely ‘cultural’ pattern: it is made of signs, representations, media and is as mutable and unstable as they are. Secondly, one can in theory switch from one-shop window, TV channel, supermarket shelf and so on to another. The instability of the modern self is thus partly understood as an aspect of the instability of modern forms of social membership.28 There are a number of arguments about the success of the sign which highlight the flattening of earlier long-established social customs. For instance, the ideas of Baudrillard, who presented a refined model of the sign values of commodities and their emerging supremacy over use values.29 Conclusions As shown in the discussion, class habitus or values, perspectives, and lifestyles shaped by membership to a social class, influence consumption practices and consumer behaviour. Bourdieu has shown theoretically and empirically the difference between the ‘taste of luxury’ and ‘taste of necessity’ in relation to food preferences. Basically, what Bourdieu is trying to clarify in his theory of distinction is the idea that the inclination is that people sharing a specific habitus, and thus social class, will respond in the same ways, have the same preferences, and hold the same opinions of tastes. References Bourdieu, P (2013) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. UK: Routledge. Bourdieu, P et al (1993) Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. UK: University of Chicago Press. Caraher, M et al. (1998) Access to healthy foods: part 1. Barriers to accessing healthy foods: differential by gender, social class, income and mode of transport. Health Education Journal. 57(3). pp. 191-201. Carfagna, L et al. (2014) An emerging eco-habitus: The reconfiguration of high cultural capital practices among ethical consumers. Journal of Consumer Culture. 14(2). pp. 158-178. Counihan, C & Van Esterik, P (2013) Food and Culture: A Reader. UK: Routledge. 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